A pause for announcements and a moment of reflection

Well, last week I got to the end of the first section (0-3) of the 1001 Books list I am using as the basis for this blog, and so I took the weekend off. Not only because I needed the break, but I thought it was a good time for some reflection on the process and perhaps a bit of tweaking.

The first thing that surprised me was how many books I couldn’t get through the library. I own a pretty good percentage of the books on the list, and the library has a lot more, as you would expect, but there are still a lot I couldn’t easily get. My plan is to procure them gradually via the money that comes in from my Patreon page, but in the meantime it means I am getting through the list at a much rapider rate than I initially expected.

As a result, as of this week I am only going to post on weekdays. So instead of seven posts a week (plus whatever extras I get around to), I’ll only be posting five. I still intend to supplement these with the “More in the Series” posts, and, eventually, with some requests, but it’s probably a good idea to mitigate my habit of over-committing and burning out sooner rather than later. 😉

For now I’m going to keep the scoring much the way it is. I’m not entirely happy with it, but I haven’t been able to work out a way to make it better yet, so I shall leave it as is for now. I’m open to suggestions though.

Now, on to a couple of things you may (or may not) have noticed:

Patreon

The Bookish Jelly Bean has a Patreon page. It is totally secondary to the point of this blog, but supporting me there means I can do things like buy the books I can’t get through the library, pay for the bookishjellybean.com domain, and generally spend a little more time doing this than I can currently afford to. (I’m a freelancer, so every hour I spend doing something I’m not being paid for pretty much literally comes out of my paycheque.) You can start at $1 a post (and I will only ever charge for two posts per week), and you can set a maximum so that you are never charged more than you’re willing to pay in any given month. There is a very limited reward level where I’ll send you a handmade postcard to say thanks, which is only a $1 reward, and is really just there to thank the people who support me early on. So, please, if you like what I’m doing here and think you can spare a few dollars a month, hop on over and become a patron. Once I start doing requests, patrons will get first dibs on that, so if you like telling people what to do, there’s some incentive. Become my boss. 😉 Or one of them at least.

Missing Books

As I’ve mentioned, some of the books in the list are hard to come by. I have made a list of all the books I haven’t been able to get yet, and there is even an Amazon wishlist of the ones I could find on Amazon. If you want to support me in a once off, more tangible way, sending me a copy of one of those books would be an awesome way to do it. If you prefer, I will even donate it to a library once I have reviewed it.

Alternatively, if you’re localish to me and have a copy of one of those books, it would be incredibly helpful if I could borrow it. 🙂

I have been keeping a spreadsheet of the ways things have been scoring, and so over the next little while will rustle up some stats on the first section for those of you who like that sort of thing. 🙂

Apart from that, I just want to thank everyone who has read and commented and liked the Jelly Bean on Facebook, and generally shown interest. A huge thanks to the people who have jumped in on Patreon to support me there, and to the amazing folk at the Wellington libraries without whom this would be totally impossible (or at least, very much slower). Support your libraries, people! For reals.